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Thursday, September 19, 2019

Facing the Music

The heavens will disappear with a roar, the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare.
--2 Peter 3:10

As I walk into Starbucks this morning, the sound system is playing one of the more annoying songs among those in their generally relentlessly annoying current repertoire--a truly cringe worthy number designed to set one's teeth on edge. 

Ah, but there are bigger problems than this in the world, bigger fish to fry to a crisp until nothing is left but ash. For, you see, I am coming here just after reading an article from the New York Times about the inescapable results of global warming by the end of the century. Somehow this brought home the reality more distinctly than I had previously experienced it, just in the same way that the author himself described suddenly facing our inevitable collective fate. 

It had not occurred to me before, for instance--probably because I hadn't really thought about it--that those peoples currently living in land masses that will be the first to suffer deadly effects--land masses such as Indonesia, with its current population of 264 million and rising--will quite naturally seek to migrate north and south to cooler climates. As portions of the earth become one after another uninhabitable, populations will continue to migrate en masse, making their destinations unlivable as well in advance of the actual flash baking of those locales.

One can only imagine, given the current attitude of the government of the United States toward asylum seekers fleeing disaster, what the response to this new 'invasion' would be. 'Burn in hell' will probably be the slogan of the privileged people of the future. 

Which all makes me feel glad to be on my way out. All of the suffering that has been visited upon people by other people--the wars, the genocides, the pogroms, the massacres--are about to be surpassed by the earth itself. Poetic justice? I don't know. I guess it just is what it is. And that is what we cannot bear to face. Eat, drink, and be merry, we say, for tomorrow we die. 

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